In Love with Defeat
by AdAbolendam
Summary: "What the hell are we waiting for?" It wasn't a rhetorical question. There was a lot standing between May and Coulson that had gone unspoken.
1. Chapter 1

**Content:** This is a two-parter from Coulson's and May's POV following Coulson's alternate dimension experience. What is it that changed between from the time he disappeared to when he returned? More importantly, why did it take so long?

The title is borrowed from "Every Breaking Wave," by U2, because those magnificent bastards have lyrics that are applicable to just about anything.

* * *

" _You know where my heart is,  
_ _The same place where yours has been  
_ _And we know that we fear to win  
_ _So we end before we begin."_

He turned over again on the narrow cot for the third time in as many minutes. Phil Coulson had four hours of rack time before the _Zephyr_ hit the tarmac in Los Angeles and he needed every second of sleep. As it turned out, fighting to keep a foothold on one dimensional plane while being forcibly dragged into another was exhausting work. But as soon as he switched off the light, she had commandeered all of his thoughts.

All he could see was that crumpled, defeated look of despair on her face when she thought he was dead followed by a pathological desperation to get him back. He had not seen her so broken since Bahrain. If he was honest with himself, he did not really believe there was enough left inside of her to be broken.

He caught a glimpse behind the mask and what he saw both frightened and excited him at once. How much had she kept to herself all of these years? Or was this new?

Coulson rolled over and rubbed his hand over his eyes.

 _No, it wasn't new_.

It had always been there, just beneath the surface. If he had allowed himself to believe it was possible, he would have seen it as clearly as he had in the cargo hold of the quinjet. Sometimes, he thought he caught glimpses: a stolen smile when she thought he wasn't looking, the constant concern over his safety, always putting his needs before her own.

But that was what May _did_.

May was a protector. As much as she might have given a long, hard stare at anyone for saying so, she was caring and nurturing. She was the teacher, the parent, the one who strengthened her team by preparing them for danger and defending them when they failed.

He was no exception.

Was he?

Coulson groaned as the monologue played again in his head for the countless time:

 _"You can't be gone, not yet… What are we waiting for?"_

But it wasn't just the words that had broken his heart.

It was her.

She was lost without him. She needed him in a way that no one had ever needed him before. The idea of his death had unraveled her composure and driven her to extreme measures.

"Why didn't you tell me, May?" He asked aloud.

 _"I did,"_ she answered, in his head. _"I told you every day since you came back from TAHITI_. _"_

"No, you didn't," he argued.

His imaginary Melinda shot him a scathing glance, lips pursed, eyebrow raised in a perfect arch.

 _"Yes, I did, Phil,"_ she said. _"You just didn't hear me."_

Coulson sat up on the cot and placed his feet on the cold, metallic floor. He rested his elbows on his knees and pressed the heels of his hands onto closed eyes. A sick, fluttery feeling had taken hold of his gut.

She hadn't told him, had she?

Not in words. Never with words.

Even before Bahrain, May preferred action to conversation. He learned her silent language slowly, over the years spent together in ops. He discovered how she could communicate more with one look than anyone else could have done with a soliloquy. But somewhere along the way, he must have forgotten how to read into the negative spaces she left between them.

No.

Not forgotten.

That was too easy.

He didn't _want_ to read into her actions. He was afraid of what he would see. He was afraid that he would see hope. Phil Coulson had abandoned the hope of Melinda's affections a long time ago.

They had grown close after May graduated the academy and was assigned as the lead specialist on his team. Two years into their service, they were nearly inseparable. He had not been afraid of what he would see when he looked at her then. He saw admiration and dedication. He even saw love. He had not hesitated to reciprocate those feelings.

They could have been something. In the part of his brain that he had not suffocated with denial, he still knew that there had been something between them then. Something real.

Then Glasgow happened.

One of the agents on their team, Leah Pendrell, was compromised on a surveillance mission. She was garroted with piano wire in the driver's seat of her parked Fiat. She never had a chance to call for backup. It was John Garrett who found her body the next morning. He phoned in the news to May and Coulson, who were waiting in a nearby safehouse for the call for Pendrell's extraction.

Coulson could still hear Garrett's flat, lifeless voice inform them that they had an agent down and he was personally escorting her body back to the Triskelion. Neither Coulson nor May had a chance to interject before Garrett cut the line.

Pendrell had been Garrett's fiancé. Their wedding was scheduled for the following weekend.

After discovering that Garrett had turned to Hydra, Coulson had wondered how much her death had factored into his decision to turn turncoat.

May was quiet that night, more so than usual.

Trying to lift their spirits (or drown their sorrows), Coulson had pulled out the bottle of Haig they had lifted weeks earlier from Fury's stash.

"Come on, Melinda," he said. "We can't perfectly good pilfered liquor go to waste. Now seems as good as time as any."

She turned to him with a sad smile.

"Save it," she protested. "We might need it more further down the line."

He shrugged and dropped the bottle into his overnight bag.

"Fine," he agreed. "Next mission that goes worse than this one, we'll break it out."

"Hard to imagine it getting much worse than this," she had whispered.

God, how young they were! If only they had known how much worse it was going to get. It was better that they did not. They would have never survived if they had known what was in store for them in the years to come.

"I couldn't do that, Phil," May had said at last.

"Do what?"

"I couldn't do what Garrett is doing now," she explained. "Burying someone you love, someone you've worked with and trusted with your life. One mistake, that's all it takes. One slip-up and any one of us could end up like Pendrell."

"Melinda, I know it's hard, but—

"It's impossible," she corrected. "I couldn't live with that kind of fear. Being terrified of losing someone I loved because of the job. Could you?"

He heard everything she said and everything she wasn't saying. He knew what she was asking. Part of him wanted to say that he could. He could live with the uncertainty of not knowing that she would come home at the end of the day, just as long as he got to spend every day that they were alive together. He wanted to argue that he wasn't so terrified of losing her and what they could be that he wasn't going to try.

But he could not. It was impossible.

It was impossible to imagine his world without Melinda May in it. He would rather have her in his life in any capacity than not at all.

"No," he said softly. "I couldn't."

And that was that.

Nothing changed between them after that night. Not really. They still watched each other's backs, fighting side-by-side. He still read between the lines of all of her silences. But he stopped looking for the hints of affection, until one day, he stopped seeing love at all. That one conversation threw up a barrier between them that could not be broached. He had accepted it as part of who they were.

A year after Glasgow, she married Andrew, and any secret hope he had harbored for a happy ending between the two of them was snuffed out.

Now, almost twenty-five years later, that dying ember was being fanned into a flame.

Sitting there in the darkened bunk, with his head in his hands, he searched his memory for all of the times he had been deaf to the silent declarations she had given him since he returned.

Finally, he heard her.

When she agreed to go back into the field, when she took up combat ops to protect him, her search for all of the unanswered questions about TAHITI, standing silent vigil over his bed after he collapsed after hours of carving, comforting him after Maveth: all of the concern and the loyalty and persistence broached the surface of his conscious, now cast in a new light.

She had been saying it for years. But he had been afraid to believe it.

Coulson stood up from the cot and blindly fumbled for his shirt and tie. He had shut her out for too long.

He was ready to listen.


	2. Chapter 2

**Part two: May's POV during "Deals with Our Devils."**

* * *

" _I wouldn't dare. You might whip my ass."_

Melinda May made a minimal effort to fight the smile that followed. She did not try to look away. Completely betraying every instinct that kept her tough-as-nails exterior intact, she lingered for a few more seconds, watching him leave.

The flight from the base to Washington, DC and AIDA was just long enough for her mind to drift.

Something had changed between her and Phil Coulson in the past few weeks.

It wasn't just one moment. It could not be chalked up to one seismic shift. But it was perceptible, almost tangible: heavy enough to be felt, but still too subtle to be given a name.

She always wanted him close, but now, when he wasn't around, his absence put her on edge. She supposed some of that could be put down to almost losing him to the quantum energy surge that had ripped him from this dimensional plane and nearly cost him his life, but that was not the whole truth of it.

She was better with him than without him.

In the field, she was more focused and alert when she knew he had her six. During their off time, she was more relaxed and happy knowing that he was safe and that he was close to her.

Then there was the fact that he actually was getting closer to her. Literally.

Earlier, in Mace's office, he stood so near that she could feel his warmth through her jacket. His touches, once so brief and infrequent, were slowly becoming more commonplace. He was still cautious with her space, still so unbearably gentle that the brushes of his hand on her shoulder or back bordered on reverence, but they were there all the same.

He was testing their boundaries. And she was letting him.

It was not completely new.

More than a few times in the past four years, she had to curb her instincts and restrain herself to maintain a professional distance between them. But now, it was more than just a few moments once in a while.

Why now?

What had changed?

Phil Coulson had saved her and she owed him her life.

Melinda May was not the kind of person that made grand, sweeping declarations. As a child, she learned from her mother that love was a verb. It was something that was shown, not talked about. So when he came back from the dead and hauled her out of that cubical, May had shown him just how much it meant that he never gave up on her with her unwavering loyalty.

The world had gone on without her in the five years since Bahrain. Everyone else left her behind and she let them. She deserved it.

She had never considered herself a particularly lucky person before Bahrain. All of her skills and her multiple successes in the field, she attributed to hard-work and natural prowess. It took one moment of bad judgment to completely obliterate her self-confidence. So much of that confidence was built on good luck, never having been at the wrong place in the wrong time. She just never realized it until that point.

It was Phil Coulson who gave her the ability to believe in herself back. She needed him because she needed to believe that what he saw in her was the truth: that she was a good person and a competent agent. It was his perception of her that made her love him. She could love herself again because he made her believe it was possible.

It wasn't until he lied to her that she understood how much of herself she had tangled up in his opinion.

Outwardly, she had been furious. Inside, she was ashamed.

She had convinced herself that he thought she was perfect, but he had obviously not even felt that she was trustworthy enough to disclose his precious Theta Protocol project to. She hated him for that.

When she left, she told him, Hunter, her father, and anyone else who bothered to ask, that she needed to find out who she was outside of SHIELD. What she meant was, she needed to find out who she was without him.

In the end, she had ended up trading one surrogate ego-boost for another. When Andrew left, she was lost.

But then, something happened. Or rather, something _did not_ happen.

She did not fall apart.

She didn't retreat into a bottle or sequester herself away from the world, or hide behind a desk somewhere. Hunter reached out to her and she helped him. _She_ helped _him._ For no other reason than the fact that he needed back-up and she knew she was good at what she did.

When that rapacious thug and his buddies cornered her in that underground fight club, she could not remember anything as delicious and exhilarating as nailing his ass to the wall and bragging about it. If Hunter hadn't been too busy getting his own ass handed to him, she would have thrown her own hand into the ring. She could have taken them all down that day. That was how good she felt.

She did not need Andrew or Coulson or her parents or anyone else's approval to know that she was worthy or necessary. It took nearly a decade, but Melinda May had finally crawled out of the ashes of Bahrain, a whole person.

It was that knowledge that gave her the strength to go back to SHIELD and to fight through all of the shit that was thrown at them in the months that followed. She was strong enough to pull Coulson through Rosalind's murder and the hell on Maveth, to help take on Hive, and to shoot the man that she once loved in the chest. She was even strong enough to let Daisy go and not blame herself for her loss.

She did not need Phil Coulson to feel like herself again.

But she wanted him.

Now that the debilitating compulsion to use him as lens through which she could see the best version of herself was gone, all that was left was him. The friend that had stood by her through the hardest years of her life. The agent who would give his life for his team or her without a second thought. The man who made everyone around him better through simple acts of kindness or by always knowing what words were needed.

SHIELD molded all of its agents into harder versions of the people they once were. By the time they reached her and Coulson's age, that tough exterior could permeate a once-compassionate person to their core. May had seen it with her mother, with Fury, even with herself. But not him.

Maveth had been as close to he'd come to slipping over the edge. She watched as he scuttled back from the precipice, terrified of the man he'd watched himself become.

May had always known he was the best person she was ever likely to meet. She had counted herself lucky that he had numbered her among his few close friends. He had helped her to become a better person.

Finally, she was ready to meet him on level ground.

But first, she needed to pick up this damned robot…

" _If you go your way and I go mine  
_ _Are we so helpless against the tide?  
_ _Baby, every dog on the street  
_ _Knows that we're in love with defeat.  
_ _Are we ready to be swept off of our feet,  
_ _And stop chasing every breaking wave?" –U2, Every Breaking Wave_

* * *

 **I have no idea if we're ever going to get a backstory for these two, so I decided to make my own. I know that this MayBot/Philinda twist is making people crazy, but I really love it! So much _angst_!**

 **Thanks for reading, guys!**


End file.
